Challenges and opportunities for post-disaster research
I was recently invited to a panel discussion hosted by the fantastic Disasters: Deconstructed Podcast to talk about key challenges and opportunities in post-disaster research.
You can watch our panel of four in action here. I learned so much from my brilliant co-panelists and hosts––and hope you will too! I’m sharing my reflections through this Medium post, in case that’s all you have time to get through today.
By way of context, our discussion follows this earlier discussion, Part I: Post-disaster research. For Part II of the series, we were asked to speak to our disciplinary and geographic contexts, and respond to key principles highlighted in the Power, Prestige, and Forgotten Values Manifesto.
In my time, I focused on analyzing three challenges –– unsettling notions of time, place, and identity in disaster research; while highlighting three current opportunities — convergence of disciplines and partnerships; increased funding commitments for longitudinal research; and approaching research as care in these precarious times.
Unsettling disasters in time
The first challenge centers around how we understand disasters in time––and so we begin by unsettling the term ‘post-disaster’!
Are disasters to be understood as disruptive events? As historical processes? Or perhaps, political (/politicized?) imaginaries?
I don’t mean this to be a trick question. The thing is, there are no wrong answers.
Just days before our livestream aired, the Disasters Deconstructed Podcast hosted a timely audience discussion around the framing of disasters as event and process. It was fascinating to hear so many different perspectives, check it out here.
I agree with the conclusion––that disasters can be framed as both event and process, depending on context.
Yet, I don’t think we’ve fully resolved the broader question. Framing disaster as an event or a process, still speaks to dominant disciplinary and programmatic ways of seeing.
Emergency managers tend to focus on the event because they are concerned with preparing for and managing disruptions. Planners tend to focus on the process because they work to reveal the root causes of disasters, and influence policy to prevent disasters and mitigate disaster risk. And yes, there are increasing overlaps between these two perspectives.
But, for a moment, I want us to think about whose voices have been missing from this fairly technocractic discussion so far? I really hope the answer going through your mind is: it’s the perspectives of people — communities who are living through disasters each year.
Communities on the frontline are likely to tell us very different things about how they experience disasters in time.
We know from years of qualitative research that disaster impacts can be experienced as forever unfolding across years, decades, even centuries. It’s important for disaster research to learn from vernacular and diverse ways of seeing, experiencing, and narrativizing disasters.
In meaningful ways, the Power, Prestige, and Forgotten Values Manifesto, which many disaster researchers have signed since 2019, encourages us to engage with diverse vernacular imaginaries.
In Part I of this series, Mihir Bhatt encouraged us to learn from mystical and spiritual traditions from around the world. Also, Terry Gibson emphasized the need to ask different questions of ‘locals’ –– by not asking them to respond to a global survey with pre-determined categories, but instead, asking them about their lived experiences — what do you consider a disaster? And why?
(For an in-depth analysis of key lessons learned and ways forward on co-learning with communities on the frontline of disaster impacts, read Chapter 5 of my doctoral thesis, here).
A great example of a vernacular imaginary of disasters is the Chitrakar scroll or living commentary provided by the Chitrakar artists of West Bengal in India, see here, and image below.
These scroll paintings are narrated in song format presenting nested cycles that fold human time into divine time or big time. This format allows diverse perspectives to co-narrate the universal and yet deeply contextual experiences, including the social and political causes and impacts of disasters.
The unifying theme in such cosmologies is that they do not limit themselves to depicting one-off events, but they constantly situate and contextualize and cross reference the experiences that connect us across time, places, and identities. These nested cycles can provide constructive and hopeful imaginaries. They present pathways to ultimately achieving interspecies health and wellbeing.
So I find that kind of imaginary really inspiring as we rethink our constructs of disasters in time as event and process.
Unsettling notions of disaster-affected ‘locals’
Our second challenge in (post-)disaster research is to do with unsettling conceptions of place and how we understand disaster affected communities to be situated and constituted in particular kinds of ‘locals’ — generally in rural landscapes, in developing countries, and in the ‘Global South’.
Social vulnerability indicators are not static — they are dynamically configured depending on a range of social, political, and environmental factors.
As we’ve seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, a society’s general affluence is no protection from extreme social vulnerability and spiraling disaster impacts.
Affluent places can experience high levels of inequality and relative deprivation which are both caused by and can result in the systemic marginalization of particular demographics.
We can agree that no matter where we currently reside, we are experiencing some form of multi scalar disaster impacts.
Where I currently live, in California, its the very unequal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, compounded by devastating wildfires and smoke, made worse by severe housing insecurity.
So, our second challenge in disaster research will be to free ourselves of this notion that only places and communities in the ‘developing world’ somehow constitute disaster affected ‘locals’.
Who does disaster research?
The third challenge is around expanding our notions of who does disaster research. This relates to a long overdue intersectional analysis of disaster researchers’ identities.
Disaster researchers are a diverse set of people with complex and layered identities who travel and live across countries, and can variously self-identify as being local, migrant, or external researchers depending on context.
So, it’s important to be reflexive and ask, who is local to where?
It is also important to ask how are non-disaster researchers conducting disaster research?
COVID-19 has triggered cascading effects bringing many non-disaster researchers from adjacent disciplines suddenly front and center into disaster research.
How can be we develop peer learning networks and supportive relationships to enable these swelling ranks of disaster researchers worldwide?
So, a meaningful intersectional analysis of disaster researchers can complicate the simply binary of local — external and ultimately, who does disaster research.
Opportunities for convergent, longitudinal, and caring research
Looking into the future, I suggest disaster researchers, and research funders, lean in to 3 existing opportunities:
The first is a commitment to convergence research whereby researchers reach out and across silos, to act as bridges between worlds and communities.
As part of our work at Wonder Labs, for example, we require convergence from teams entering our Reimagining 2025: Living with Fire Design Challenge program.
We ask teams to be interdisciplinary and represent at least two distinct disciplines, and partner with at least one community partner, who directly receives part of the funding from Wonder Labs.
In doing so, we can support deeply contextual and convergent conceptualizations of what constitutes disaster research and who benefits from it.
The second opportunity is in funding more longitudinal research that can allow researchers and communities to form lasting bonds across one, two, five, even 10 years of research.
Longitudinal research that engages with people’s whole lived experience, not just post-disaster recovery and reconstruction, can enable us to commit to taking the time and care to engage with communities on an ongoing basis.
Equally, post-disaster researchers need to learn to hear ‘no’ from communities — if grassroots organizations don’t have the bandwidth to work with you, take no for an answer, leave them with something useful to remember you by — and perhaps re-engage at a later stage if its still mutually possible to do so.
Finally, the past years have shown that disaster researchers are increasingly from disaster affected communities. What can be learned from researchers who are already steeped in their communities and are working on mitigating impacts, acting as bridges, translators, and reimaginers of desired and possible futures?
In conclusion, my hope is that the swelling ranks of disaster researchers worldwide can find support, care, and develop trust in relationships with co-researchers, institutions, and communities wherever they live and work in these precarious times.
If you have thoughts to share, do leave a comment––I really look forward to continuing this conversation with disaster researchers from around the world.
